How to Owe a Favor
by Wilhelmina Willoughby
Summary: L/J. It all starts when Lily helps James with an Arithmancy assignment. Now, she's not sure how many favors are owed, or how far in debt she is, but there's one thing she does know: she's definitely in trouble.


_A/N: Just a quick, cute little one-shot. And also an opportunity to let you know that I am indeed working on the next chapter for Quiet Summer, and that I appreciate greatly your continued reviews and favorites and messages (seriously—you guys are awesome), aaand that I have made a tumblr! It has little to nothing on it right now, but mostly it's for my fandom needs, and I'm going to start posting little fics and stuff on there, so if you want to check it out or add me or drop some prompts or comments or what have you into my ask box (anonymous is on, if you don't have a tumblr), you can find me at minawill DOT tumblr DOT com. _

_Always,  
Mina :) _

* * *

"Do you know what this class should be called? 'What Am I Even Reading?' Because, really, _what is this_?"

Lily rolls her eyes as Potter flops down next to her on the couch, slouching like he's got no bones left. He stares at the fire, glares at it like it's done him some great injustice, like it's the fountain from which all of his problems in life pour forth, and even though Lily would really rather him not, he keeps on. "I mean, if I wanted to do maths, I would've gone to muggle school. What's this stuff got to do with being an Auror? Or with playing Quidditch? We're in sixth year and it's only now relevant? Explain that to me, Lily Evans."

He continues on whinging as Lily scoots further away from him. It's hard to care about his Arithmancy problems when she's busy studying for Ancient Runes. It's also hard to care because it's James Potter, and he's sitting on her couch during her prime homework time, when everybody is sleeping in their dorms and the common room is quiet, and he's whinging at her, and she'd almost rather throw herself into the lake and have the merpeople take her away than listen to him whine some more.

"It's just like Divination wanted to ruin my life further so it took some numbers as disguise and hid itself as another subject."

"Mmhmm," she responds finally, going back to read the same paragraph over again.

Potter groans and pulls off his glasses. He tosses them onto the coffee table, on top of some of her notes. The movement catches Lily's eye, and she watches as he rests his forearms on his thighs, leans forward, and looks at the floor. "Numbers," he grumbles.

Lily doesn't feel bad. She doesn't. She is reading her book, and she is going to take more notes, and she is not letting his pathetic drama get to her because obviously he is exaggerating his problems to make them seem much worse than they are. It's just Arithmancy. He's ace at everything else because he sits down and studies—she's seen it happen. She's seen him spend hours hunched over Transfiguration books, seen him come back from Quidditch practice bruised and bloodied and sweating, and these things he's good at because he puts time into them. He's not good at Arithmancy because he won't sit down to learn it.

Not that she tells him this. Not that it's interrupting her studying at all, either, but the more she tells herself this, the more often she has to keep going back to the same paragraph to read it over and over again. Each time she looks at it, her eyes glance over the words, skim over the shapes of the letters and then the repetition of the lines and then it just blurs into blocks after blocks of text and, hell, it's hard to focus with a depressed Potter sitting next to her.

"I just don't want to fail," he mumbles. He runs his hands through his hair so that it all sticks straight up like he's been struck by lightning. That, and his crooked, loosed tie, and the sad curve of his lips that indicate surrender, and his dumb sad eyes—it all makes for a sad and miserable picture and maybe, if she just helps him and gets it over with, he'll leave her alone.

This is what she tells herself, anyway.

She sighs heavily and puts her book down in her lap. "Oh, for heaven's sake. I will tutor you in Arithmancy. As long as you shut up and go away after."

Potter slowly looks up at her, a gradual look of happy disbelief prickling all over his face.

"Go get your book before I change my mind," she tells him.

He jumps up. His enthusiasm is obnoxious, and she's not sure if his excitement is from the possibility of not failing his Arithmancy exam or because Lily is actually offering to help him with something without being forced to do so. "Alright," he says, putting his glasses back on before splaying his hands out in front of him, as if doing so would keep her on the couch. "Alright. I'll be right back. Don't move, don't go anywhere." And then he runs upstairs.

She doesn't move, not really; she sits there and wonders what in the world has come over her. Mostly she offered to stop him from complaining, but a small part of it was the waver in his voice when he said he didn't want to fail. He's not completely awful all of the time, and she knows this, and it hurts her to admit it. She is quick to wall that part off, though, to shut it away before Potter comes back and sniffs her affection for him right out of the air. Because it's not _affection_, it's more like slight regard bordering on a disgusting kind of fondness. He's like a fungus. Lily almost chuckles to herself. James Potter is like a fungus, and once he clings onto you, he doesn't let go—he clutches on, and he spreads, and he wraps his big eyes and his shifting smiles around you and he infects your mind and makes you feel things like _fondness _and _maybe he isn't so bad_. And the only way to combat this fungus is to ignore it, to look away from it, to pretend like it doesn't keep you up at nights, thinking about it.

But now she's gone and offered her assistance. Isn't that fantastic? The last thing she needs is for him to think she _cares_ about him.

When he jogs back down the stairs, his arms are laden with stuff. He dumps it all on the couch and starts to clear a space to sit.

"Maybe you should sit in the armchair," Lily suggests.

"Nah. It's more comfortable here," he says, smiling his knowing smile at her. He's not fooled. "Plus, this way, we can share the book easier."

Lily grits her teeth. It was more of a hint than a suggestion—_sit in the armchair, I don't want you so close—_but his deflection was too easy. Probably because she'd been too obvious. So she tries again: "Potter—"

"I brought you a blanket." He drops it, soft and burgundy, in her lap. At her boggled glance up at him, he says, "You looked cold. Also, Remus does Arithmancy with muggle pencils, so I brought some of those." He holds out a handful of pencils.

She takes a pencil from him, then, after a brief hesitation, spreads out his blanket over her legs. She assumes that there's some kind of warming charm on it, because it retains heat like a stone after sitting in the sun all day. Admittedly, she was getting chilly, and she does Arithmancy with pencils, too, and for a long moment she watches Potter settle himself in next to her and wonders how he knew.

"Okay," she says warily across the safe foot of space between them. Even though he is still within touching distance, she can deal with that. It's not like he's invading her personal space. Sometimes Sirius sits closer to her than this at the dinner table, and she grins and bears that. This is a much safer situation. And it's just Potter. "Okay," she says again to herself.

Potter chuckles. "Okay. Now, here's where I'm stuck."

**.o.O.o.**

It becomes clear pretty damn quickly that Potter has no idea what he's doing. Either that or he's a terrific actor, but judging by his complete frustration and the constant flow of wrong answers coming from his pencil, Lily doubts it.

For the first thirty minutes, it was kind of cute. Kind of. She is loath to admit it, but yeah, the way he chewed on his pencil and looked at her with rapt attention when she explained something to him was endearing. She explained it, and then he tried an example. She showed him where he went wrong, and then he tried again, and then she guided him through the process, and he grunted and did it again, only it was still wrong, so he tossed his pencil across the room and ran his hands down his face. Bolstering her patience, Lily made him get up to get his pencil and do it again.

After another half hour, Lily starts to get as irritated as Potter. She keeps explaining it to him but he just doesn't _get it _and she doesn't know how else to go about it. They're numbers. There are charts with numbers and you figure out the pattern and do the math and then you put them in the chart. What else is there?

"I don't understand why you can't get this," she tells him.

"Yeah, well, me either." He takes the book from her lap and closes it, tosses it onto the coffee table on top of a crumpled up Chocolate Frog packet and his messy attempts at charts, and sinks back into the couch. They have become increasingly more close to one another in the past hour and his arm brushes against hers as he sits there, staring at nothing. "Maybe this is a hopeless case, like the time Peter tried to hit on Madame Rosmerta. In this case, I am Peter, the bumbling antihero, and Arithmancy is the beautiful yet elusive Madame Rosmerta: utterly out of my reach."

Lily laughs. "He did not."

"He did." Potter sighs. "And this is just like that. I don't even _need _this stuff—why do I have to learn it? Transfiguration is useful, Charms is useful, hell, even Potions has its merits, but this is torture for the sake of torture. And with _numbers._"

"There are numbers involved in all of those classes," she reminds him, drawing a quick sketch of a simple Transfiguration diagram on the corner of her number charts. She points to the some of the runes nestled within the contours. "Some of these are even numbers. This rune here? _Three._ Helps with keeping the spell together."

When she looks up from her sketch, Potter is gazing at her silently. The intensity on his face is a little disturbing and it actually makes her face heat up, which is stupid, stupid, stupid, and she turns away so that she can't see him out of her periphery any more. She's glad of it, too, because after an awkward few seconds, he clears his throat and says, "That was brilliant."

She shrugs. It wasn't any such thing, but—Transfiguration. It was Transfiguration. All she did was draw a sketch of something he recognized, something he understood immediately. _That's it._ Potter needed to understand the reason for doing something in order to do it. He makes a joke of Divination, always fools around in class, and so he makes a joke of Arithmancy, in turn. Only Arithmancy is worse, of course, because it has numbers. But Transfiguration has numbers too, and—

Lily lets herself get excited, if only because she has figured out the puzzle of how to drill Arithmancy into this bloke's head.

"Listen," she says, pulling the book back up off the coffee table. Potter leans over to her at the same time she scoots closer to him and it brings them almost face-to-face. For probably the first time since she's known him, she sees all the different flecks of color in his eyes and it brings her up short. He's kind of handsome. Kind of. Kind of _handsome?_

She jerks her face away. _Kind of handsome? Oh, God. _Transfiguration. She is on Transfiguration. The book provides a distraction for the both of them and she pulls it between them like a barrier, like having something physical separating them will possibly help her pull back that realization of him being attractive. "Um," she says. She stares at the blank parchment resting on top of the book, then draws a shaky hourglass shape. "This is, um, a basic outline for _Geminio._ Which you know."

"Right." As if nothing just happened, he tilts the book toward himself and starts filling in the drawing, sketching curves connecting the weakest part of the hourglass, his large hand filling in the tiniest runes with accuracy, as far as Lily can tell. When he finishes, he turns it back to her. "Here."

Around her messy outline, he's practically drawn a work of art. She rolls her eyes. "You can do this from memory, but you can't fill in an Arithmancy chart? Look. Point out the most important runes to this spell."

"Lily—"

"_Potter_."

"Fine," he says. As if to punish her, he sidles closer to her side before touching his pencil to the runes in the center of the diagram. "These three on the top half, these three on the bottom, and the one in the middle. The first six keep the spell from breaking apart, but the last one makes the transfiguration happen."

Lily feels herself grin at him. "Do you hear what you just said?"

"Yeah, yeah. A bunch of numbers. But that doesn't have anything to do with—"

"It does!" She holds his drawing up, grips his chin in her other hand, and forces him to look at it. "Look. This is the same thing as a chart. You just have to stop thinking about it like Divination and let it be its own entity. Everything is related, essentially, through magic, but you can choose what you associate."

Potter smiles at her—she is touching his face, why is she touching his face, let go, _let go_—and laughs as she yanks her hand back. "You're probably right. More examples?"

"Yeah," she says. Why is she still blushing? And why is he still looking at her? And why can't she make herself look away? "More examples."

**.o.O.o.**

An hour later, Lily yawns and snuggles farther beneath Potter's ever-warm blanket. They sit side-by-side in the middle of the couch with the Arithmancy book resting between them. The common room is silent save for the crackling of the fire and Potter's pencil scratching on parchment, and Lily's almost convinced that she's sleeping because her head has lolled to the side to rest on Potter's shoulder. He hasn't said anything about it, or even reacted—he just keeps filling in charts, every now and again erasing some numbers and then holding his progress up to her.

"Looks good," she tells him, covering up another yawn and squinting through bleary eyes to see his answers. "I think you've got it."

His sigh of relief almost explodes from his chest. "I have _conquered Arithmancy_."

It makes her smile. She doesn't even care how annoying he is. That's how proud—both of herself and of him—and exhausted she is. "Congratulations."

"You're a good coach."

"Well... Yeah, I'm pretty great."

Potter laughs. He looks down at her, head perched on his shoulder, arm and leg and side pressed against his, and he is entirely too close but for some reason she doesn't pull away, only looks at him. Mostly she hates him but tonight he was different, tolerable and kind, and he made her laugh and blush and feel smart and—and what is going on? It feels like a helium balloon is expanding in her chest, like his face is inching closer to hers, like maybe if she didn't spend most of her time wanting to punch him, she'd allow herself to see him like this more often.

And his face _is _moving closer to hers, slowly, as if moving a tiny bit at a time will slip by her unnoticed, but she does notice, and she doesn't know if she's more embarrassed at herself for thinking about letting him or thinking about what it might feel like to have his lips press against hers. For a second, she closes her eyes, lets his hair tickle her forehead, then pulls away.

"I can't—"

"I'm sorry—"

Lily nods. "It's okay. I, um, I think we're good here?"

"Yeah. Uh, yeah, we're good," Potter says. He busies himself with stacking up his notes and gathering all of his pencils and quills and candy wrappers. His shoulders are hunched; she can hear him muttering to himself, and while none of it is particularly audible, she can make some guesses as to what he's saying.

She feels bad for turning away, but what else was she supposed to do? Sighing, she stands, folds up his blanket, and holds it out to him. "Thanks for this."

He takes it from her, stacks it on top of his pile of stuff, and turns to face her. "I'm sorry for trying that. I don't want this to be weird, Lily; things were going so well, and it was really nice of you to help me out and I should've just said thank you, so thank you, and I owe you one, and I won't try to—"

"It's fine," she says. It's fine, right? It's fine. It was only a moment, a mistake, and nothing happened, so everything's alright, and tomorrow everything will be okay. Hopefully.

"Okay," he says, holding out his hand.

She takes it. His fingers wrap gently around hers. "Okay," she says, shaking his hand.

He gathers up his things and makes his way to the stairwell. "Remember, I owe you one," he calls across the common room, tossing her an earnest smile before turning away and disappearing from sight.

Yeah, he owes her one. Her studying time for the night is shot, but her exam isn't until next week, anyway. Plenty of time to make up her notes tomorrow. So she gathers up her own books and notes and hikes it up the stairwell to her dormitory, failing miserably at wiping the stupid, shy smile off her face.


End file.
